The Most Powerful Local Marketing Channels

in Google, and Gavin Holt’s site turns up on the first page of over 16 million results.

Benefits

Leads without recommendations are likely to start their search for a photographer by using a keyword string that contains their location. When Gavin Holt turned professional, all his bookings came in through his optimized website. As he built experience, half came in through referrals but Google was still responsible for 50 percent of his earnings.

Disadvantages

SEO optimization isn’t straightforward. It’s competitive, slow to yield results and can change at any time. When we first spoke to Gavin while researching our wedding photography book, his site was second on Google’s results pages. It’s now third from the bottom

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Using Email Marketing to get More Photography Jobs

They work in fields that range from lifestyle and food to fashion and editorial. The company supplies photographers with a variety of services that start with the ability to draw up a list of potential buyers, such as magazine editors and ad agency art buyers who work in a particular field or in a particular region, and send them a marketing pitch. But photographers can also manage their entire email campaign through the site, purchase design services, hire a campaign manager and put together a direct marketing mail campaign as well.

The results are fairly typical, and perhaps even a little low, for email marketing. According to Christine Andrews of Agency Access, photographers who send email pitches to buyers on the company’s lists can expect their messages to receive open rates of between 15 and 20 percent, and clickthrough rates of between 3 and 5 percent. That compares to open rate averages across different industries of 24.8 percent at the end of 2011 and click rates of 5.2 percent.

A Marketing Message is Part of a Plan

Photographers though don’t need to have giant clickthrough rates because they don’t need to have giant client lists. Each commission may be worth several thousand dollars, generate repeat offers and win the kind of personal recommendations that buyers use the most. A single commission would be more than enough to justify the expense and the time involved in creating the campaign.

While AgencyAccess has the contact lists though, the addresses themselves are only a small part of a successful email campaign.

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